Q&A: IPS's David Altschuler on Maryland Boot Camps

By Glenn SmallHomewood

David M. Altschuler (pictured at right) is a
principal research scientist at the Johns Hopkins
Institute for Policy Studies who specializes
in juvenile crime and who is considered to be a leading authority
on aftercare issues relating to juvenile justice. Altschuler
recently completed work with the governor's task force looking
into allegations of neglect and abuse at three Maryland boot
camps for juvenile delinquents.

How did you get involved in the
governor's task force?

The formal title of the task force is the Juvenile Offender
Aftercare Assessment Team. This particular assessment team is
"part two" because there was an initial team charged specifically
with looking at the allegations of abuse in the three boot camps
in Western Maryland. #It was that first assessment team [that]
looked at the allegations of abuse and corroborated those
allegations.

At the time the first team was appointed, it was also
announced that there would be a second assessment team, which
would focus on the community supervision/aftercare piece. The
original series in The Baltimore Sun discussed an abuse and
neglect situation. You can think of it in terms of the abuse part
related to what was going on at the boot camp; the neglect piece
was once they left the boot camp and went into the community. We
were charged with taking a look at the community
supervision/aftercare piece. They approached me because they were
aware of my work on the subject of transition aftercare.

There were 12 members of the assessment team task force. What did
you do to look into this?

We took testimony from the Department of Juvenile Justice
staff. We had folks who were contractors or service providers
come and speak to us about their experiences. We brought in some
people involved in aftercare, parole, transition-type programs
from other parts of the country, to tell us how they were
operating. We conducted a performance audit, in which records on
a number of cases were collected and analyzed, so we could get a
clear picture of the state of the record-keeping system. We also
had focus groups with juveniles who had been involved in the
aftercare program and with some parents who were involved. We did
a focus group with probation officers from around the state. We
met with several judges.

So we really, I think, conducted a fairly wide-ranging
exploration from varying perspectives of what was going on and
what was not going on with the department and its whole
transition and aftercare approach.

For someone who doesn't know what a boot camp is, can you
describe what it was supposed to do?

There were around 50 juvenile boot camps spread across the
country, but I think within the last year or so the popularity
has waned considerably. Maryland is just the most recent instance
where the boot camps have been shut down. The idea behind the
boot camp, which was pioneered with adult offenders in Georgia
and Oklahoma, was that this would form an intermediate sanction;
rather than send an individual for a term of confinement in a
correctional facility, those who qualified could be placed into
shorter-term residences and boot camps. During the number of
months that individuals are in these boot camps, with some
variations from place to place, one of the common threads is the
military regimentation and discipline aspect.

In addition to the military structure, discipline,
regimentation, marching and so on, at least in theory, there are
supposed to be other components related to education, counseling
or drug treatment and also a focus on the transition and re-entry
back into the community. The fact of the matter is, there has
been a very uneven record in the provision of these other kinds
of services. And some of the boot camps have utilized the initial
period of induction as a time to, quote-unquote, break down the
individual, presumably based on some model of military boot camp,
which, perhaps with the exception of the Marines, was long ago
abandoned.

The way it was sort of pitched to the public was as a kind of a
'90s "scared straight, get tough with these juveniles who are
causing problems and let's, you know, make them exercise, work
them out, supposedly like the military, and then they come out
all spiffy and everything will be wonderful." But that's not
really what happened?

The analogy has never worked, quite frankly. The analogy
breaks down when you think about the purposes of the military
boot camp. In the military, the boot camp was all about weeding
out folks who wouldn't be suitable for a military career.

That's quite different in a correctional environment, where
that's not the idea at all. More than that, in the military boot
camp, the whole point behind the training and the discipline is
preparation for a career; beyond that, there is access to a range
of benefits associated with military life and retirement. This is
not consistent with correctional objectives and purposes. In most
cases, there has been very little attention on what exactly was
going to be the next step for offenders when they leave the boot
camp. That has been, in fact, one of the problems. So the
military analogy breaks down there.

In that military analogy, as you said, someone leaves the boot
camp and lands a job, with food and health care and pay and
benefits and something to do. But when someone graduated from a
Maryland juvenile boot camp, what did they end up
with?

Almost nothing. And I think it might even be the case that
they were worse off because the way in which they were
conditioned and regimented and socialized in that boot camp
atmosphere in no way prepared them for what they were likely to
encounter when they went back home.

To the extent that they actually bought into the boot camp,
they were in for a rude awakening once back in the community.
And, in fact, the reports in The Sun document rather
clearly that the rate of failure among the group of youngsters
that it followed was astoundingly high. Almost all of them ended
up back on drugs, back involved in breaking the law.

And The Sun also found that the extent and nature
of involvement that the aftercare workers had with the youngsters
was so minimal that it could hardly provide supervision, let
alone any kind of meaningful interaction or referral into other
kinds of services that would be provided.

As you said, the assessment team found that the aftercare, or
lack of aftercare, went across the board, not just in boot camps.
You did come up with specific suggestions or recommendations.
What are a few of those?

What we came up with were 1) recommendations that relate to
the actual administrative structure and organization of the
agency, 2) recommendations and issues that relate to the work
force and 3) recommendations and issues that relate to the
program that they're providing.

With respect to the organization and structure of the
agency, I think it's fair to say that the task force found that
the department was organized in a manner that in no way, shape or
form encouraged the kind of systematic, collaborative planning
and implementation that would be required to actually do
transition and aftercare. And while we did not come up with a
specific reorganization plan, we identified some of the
difficulties that need to be addressed.

With respect to the staff itself, it turns out there are
enormous problems. High turnover appears to be a function of very
low pay and also very low morale. Some people stay so short [a
time] that they never actually get the full training that is
available to them through the training division before they leave
and go off to a neighboring jurisdiction that pays a lot more. So
there's a work force problem.

There is difficulty in that supervisors have to oversee such
large numbers of staff that they are not in a position to do much
staff monitoring and in turn are not in a position to review what
those staff people are doing on particular cases. Partly because
there are so many new staff coming and going all the time,
supervisors just don't have very much time to do some of the
important routine things that would be required.

In terms of programming, there are real problems in getting
families involved, of having qualified, trained people who can
work with families that are in crisis. Many of these families are
having difficulties that are very deep-seated and long-standing.
And that requires some real sustained, concerted effort to work
with families. You'll see quite an emphasis in our report on the
need to deal with the family and not merely focus on the
youngster.

One of the interesting findings was that we discovered that
the standards of contact required for kids and their aftercare
workers were so low as to be, for all intents and purposes,
useless. And yet, even those meager standards couldn't be met.

So, a lot of what you've
said--supervisors who have too many people to supervise, can't
follow their own regulations, people who are coming and going
very quickly because they're not getting enough training or
pay--doesn't a lot of this boil down to how much money the agency
has and how willing or unwilling politicians are to invest money
in something that's not a glitzy ballpark?

Interestingly enough, they're willing to spend money on the
building of correctional facilities, which is very, very
expensive. So I don't know that I would agree with the premise
that it's simply a matter of not enough money. Partly, it's a
matter of how you spend the money you have. Given X number of
dollars, you're still going to need to overhaul, reorganize and
substantially change the way you do business. I think there's
some money that's being spent very inefficiently and in very
nonproductive ways. Spending huge amounts of the budget on the
kids who get locked up, and spending relatively very little on
the community piece, is, to me, just throwing away money.

The governor's budget reflects an increase, much greater
than for other agencies in the state, for juvenile justice. And I
do believe, for reasons that are outlined in the task force
report, that more money is warranted. However, at the same time,
it's going to take a very sustained, concerted, committed effort
to restructure and revitalize that agency.